The 'switch-on'

An amazing essay by poet and musician Josephine Dickinson about hearing with a cochlear implant (via Shanna C.):

The extent to which the brain compensates for indistinction I discovered by listening to birdsong. The first time I heard a blackbird with my new high-frequency bias, I was stunned by its clarity and beauty, and by the fact that it was so loud. In a healthy ear the arrays of thousands of hair cells operate according to a ‘volleying’ mechanism, taking it in turns to transmit the very fast-moving energy impulses of high-frequency sound. The electrodes of the implant cannot do this. Yet by looking at spectrograms of birdsong, I can see that a large proportion of the sound is within the frequency limits of what I can distinguish, albeit crudely, and that is enough for me to take in and interpret these songs, many of which I have no memory of hearing before.

Prosthesis

We really are living in a great age of prosthetics (it is one of my favorite things about doing the New York City Triathlon, too, which is otherwise a rather overpriced and crowded and hot race, that you see so many young fast athletes racing on prosthetic legs). (FT site registration required.)

(Photo credit: Takao Ochi for the FT)

This picture makes me think of my mild prejudice against most performance art - given the possibilities of avant-garde musical performance, why wouldn't you be a musician instead? You get all the potentially good parts of performance art plus music....

Writing from Cayman. I made it here safely, only as so often the case at the cost of a minor lung ailment! No exercise this weekend, accordingly & unfortunately, but it is still very nice to be here, even with massive pile of work and lungs like creaky bellows. Light reading along the route: Mark Billingham, From the Dead (not actually a new book and rather inferior to the usual Thorne standard, which may explain why it wasn't published in the US at the time); Victor Gischler, The Deputy (enjoyable gonzo noir, slightly under-proofread); James S. A. Corey, The Butcher of Anderson Station. Just now dug in on the first installment of one of my favorite books from childhood, one of the best value-for-money (re)reading opportunities on the internet!

Soft touch

The revolution in artificial limbs.

Toronto was highly worthwhile but very very tiring! About to head to the library for some Tom Jones and Sorrows of Young Werther time....

Deaf aid

Jenny Diski's hearing instrument.

Clover's lithotomy crutch

Very good long sequence of photographs with the Independent's review of an exhibition of objects illuminating the history of medicine (on loan from the Wellcome Trust to the Science Museum).